Virtue has been rewarded with a return to the schedules for BBC4's dark and unglamorous hospital comedy Getting On, launched last year with three superbly measured episodes of low-key wit and broad hilarity. Who (of the 19 people who saw it) can forget the fun had with the self-important Dr Moore's faecal stool research programme or the eloquently brief wrangling over the ethics of eating a dead woman's birthday cake, or those oases of tedium, ticking with wicked purpose.

The first thing I noticed, though – even as the great Richard Hawley title song lulled us into the new series – was how healthily Daz blue everything looked. Here came the familiar cameras, zooming and retreating in homage to The Thick of It (courtesy of director Peter Capaldi), but where was the bilious washed-out decor and bad complexions and air of neglect? Had the MRSA police been in with the Mr Muscle and a lick of paint? Had someone been ironing the uniforms?

It soon began to ooze some of the old malodorous promise with the arrival of a comatose female of no fixed abode smelling like "an every-orifice cocktail", as dogsbody nurse Kim (mistress of droll, Jo Brand) put it, vying with ward sister Den (Joanna Scanlan) for best evocative observation of human pungency. Something was rotten down there…

There was more laughter to be milked out of it with the entrance of no-nonsense consultant Dr Moore (the excellent Vicki Pepperdine), blind to preposterousness as she urged her retinue of horrified dimwit trainees to peer into the poor woman's back passage and see a valuable learning opportunity. "So… perineal abscess? Rectal prolapse? Anal fistulae?" It was funny, but it did start to dribble away into a dull scene about the new gerontology wing, only to be picked up again by Donald the porter, trying to offload the offending patient on other unwilling departments, his gurney journeying back and forth with diminishing comic power. By the time he parked it in the corridor the only smell I could detect was the new lino.

To be fair there were entertaining skirmishes but they lacked the friction that gave the last series its crackling energy. Den has lost her fear of the officious Dr Moore. Sexually bi-curious matron Hilary – a monster of neuroses held in check by self-help psychobabble – has been stripped of his menace (like Samson before him, I believe) by the blowjob Den gave him in the back of a taxi. And where were the delicious lingual infelicities, the absurdities of NHS jargon, the workplace correctness that left Kim floundering in useless common sense – the whole pickle of moral compromise without which drama can be neither funny nor tragic? Perhaps it will all be back next week. I hope so.

David Attenborough has been working in television longer than almost anyone on earth has been watching it, so he was bound to have a few stories. But it was the way he told 'em that made Attenborough's Journey the treat it was. There was one about the difficulty of trying to remove a gecko from his finger, and the occasions during his Zoo Quest years when he and Mrs Attenborough had friends round for dinner with the house smelling of animal piss ("That's surely not mulligatawny soup…"). And who could resist the one about the race to beat the Germans to colour TV, when he was controller of BBC2 in 1967? "Well, we had just won the war," he explained, measuring time as only someone interested in fossils can.

There was a lot of ground to cover, not least Attenborough's pioneering role in the classic series Civilisation and The Ascent of Man, forerunners in ambition for his own epic programmes that brought us swooping aerial shots and night cameras and the miracles of photography that could slow a bee's wings in flight or make flowers bloom in an instant. But it was just as enjoyable watching him fool around on location for his new series (First Life, which starts on Friday). Here he was with his old chum Professor Fortey, chortling abstrusely to themselves about Moroccan Trilobites, like characters from Harry & Paul. Elsewhere he was muttering about being required to wear an interested expression, or walk in a particular way. "You can give them the John Wayne, which is tight-buttocked," he said wistfully. "But I'm not allowed to do it much these days."

It was worth watching just to see Attenborough swat a mosquito. "Got the bastard," he said.

The British are proud animal lovers, but imagine the racket if London's half a million stray cats told their own story. As it happens, Wonderland: Mad Cats and Englishwomen did it for them, though at times it sounded more like an argument to keep dogs. How brave – or possibly ill advised – were Celia and Pat, the former running a frenzied inner-city neutering and castration service, the other scouring the streets looking for abused and starving strays to join the dozens already infesting her modest and frankly less than salutary domestic arrangements. They had cats coming out of their ears. I've never seen two women look more knackered, and of course cat collecting isn't something you can get out of without adding to the problem. It's not like owning racehorses. Pat dreamed of romance, though she had tried and failed. "You have to have a special guy. One that can put up with dirt trays all over the house. Men hate that." Yes, I believe they do.

I enjoyed How to Get a Head in Sculpture presented by the actor David Thewlis, who asked three artists to do his likeness. While they got on with it, we learnt (from contributors as diverse, in their attachment to ballroom dancing, as Ann Widdecombe and Maggi Hambling) about the symbolic value of heads in western culture, from the emperor Augustus – he of the lunatic staring eyes in the British Museum – to Marc Quinn's equally compelling Self, the model of his own head made from pints of frozen blood.

But was the point to go for physical accuracy or something that stood for the person beneath the skull? You had to ask artist Tom Price, whose miniature sculpture not only depicted Thewlis as a black man, but a black man who didn't look anything like Thewlis. So in what sense was it Thewlis's head? It had me scratching mine.

If Child Genius: Five Years On showed us anything, it was how being older and less cute than you used to be can take the shine off the most precocious talent. One chess prodigy hadn't got beyond No 42 in world rankings; the 10-year-old published novelist of 2005 was now concentrating on his GCSEs. And was budding film director Aimee's irritation at her mother's inferior intellect a sign of astronomical cleverness or just a sign of being 15?

I preferred the new intake: eight-year-old "mini-Monet" Kieron who had just bought a nice house in Cornwall with the money earned from his paintings; and how about cheerful maths wizards the Ahmed boys, 10 and 12, whose parents proudly revealed their masterplan to sell their sons' souls into corporate actuarialism? Well, we can all dream.